Untitled (14 page)

   With the window open the room is cold enough for her to see her breath, and it hangs in ghostly shapes. The covered furniture has a sinister look, as though Mr. Henry Bentley is here somewhere, lurking. It takes all her nerve, but she tugs off the dust sheets, one after the other, holding her breath until she sees beneath them only chairs, a dressing table, a washstand. The air is full of dust now, but she doesn't care. Better that than what she imagined beneath those sheets—Mr. Henry with his eyes rolled back and his clothes still damp from seawater, his cold, dead hands reaching for her.

   She's shivering. She wraps her arms around herself and looks over what needs to be done: the mattress to be shaken and brushed, the bed made up with fresh linen, the curtains taken down, the rug taken up and beaten, the carpet swept, the floorboards scrubbed, the furniture polished, the trophies on the mantelpiece—what are they for?— dusted. By the time Sarah comes in she has already shaken out the top mattress and fed the feathers that escaped back through the seam of the tick. Over one arm Sarah has sheets and a blanket. She lifts her shoulders, says, "It's freezing in here."

   "It smelled stale."

   "Opening the window for half an hour isn't going to make any difference." She drops the linen on the bed and puts her hands on her hips. "If I were you, I'd close the window before I caught my death of cold."

   "It's not so bad."

   "Not so bad?" She shakes her head. "You've got no sense. No point making things harder on yourself, is there? Besides, when you're finished up here you'll have to give Elsie a hand with the laundry. Come on." She starts unfolding the under-blanket. "Let's get on with it."

   "But I haven't swept yet."

   "Who's going to know? If you want a hand, take it now before I change my mind."

   This day is all wrong, her routine, such as it is, bucked and twisted. Today, laundry day of all days, there is Mr. Henry's room to do, on top of everything else, and Sarah's to do the other rooms as quickly as she can. Early this morning—at a time when the servants usually have the house to themselves—Mrs. Robert came downstairs and stood in the kitchen doorway to talk to them all, and she asked them for their greatest effort because, at a time like this, they all needed to help one another keep the household running as it should.

   Sarah seems not to have listened. Mr. Henry is dead, but from the bright look about her you'd think that today was Christmas: not a day off, but a day of excitement and pleasure nonetheless. While Jane unfolds her end of the blanket and flaps it to loosen the creases, Sarah holds her end tight in her hands and says, "I wonder what she's like. Mrs. Johnson reckons Mr. Henry was a bit of an old stick-in-the-mud, and then he goes and gets married all of a sudden without telling anyone. Maybe she's a beauty and he couldn't help himself."

   "Sarah!" It comes out more as a hiss than a word, and she glances around her. To speak so lightly of the dead—the very recently dead too—isn't right.

   "Oh, come on." Sarah laughs. "You've been wondering too, I know you have."

   Instead of saying anything, Jane presses her lips together.

   "See?" Sarah sounds delighted. "You can't deny it."

   But that's not it at all. Last night when she'd heard enough of Mrs. Johnson's stories about Mr. Henry as a serious young man, and Sarah's speculations about the widowed bride, and Elsie bursting out with "It's a bloomin'
tra
gedy," she'd taken her candle and gone up to bed. When she heard Sarah come in she'd kept her eyes closed and her breathing slow. The darkness behind her eyes had lightened— Sarah standing close with her candle. She'd felt the tickle of Sarah's breath on her cheek.

   "I know you're only pretending, orphan girl," she said and laughed softly.

   Jane had to hold herself in, to concentrate on not letting her eyelids twitch until, eventually, she heard the floorboards creak under Sarah's feet, the soft rustle of Sarah pulling off her clothes, the gentle thud of her boots being put on the floor, the groan of the bed as she lay down, then with a whisper the room went dark. Jane let herself imagine the rush of wind against her face: a storm at sea, the tops of monstrous waves catching the moonlight, a young woman on the deck of a ship—her hair torn loose, her dark dress flapping in the wind. Then her mouth wide with horror as the ship lurches, and a wave crashes over the deck. She is alone. She calls for her husband, but he is not there, and a member of the crew—where has he come from?—must force her into the lifeboat, for she is too distraught to think for herself. Then she changed the details—the woman is not on the deck but in a cabin—and she spun the story around, this way and that until she fell asleep and the tragedy of it all swallowed her.

   "Well," Sarah is saying, "we'll see her soon enough. Then we'll know all about her." She opens her arms to hold the sheet straight, and together they lay it across the bed. Then there's a second sheet, a heavy blanket, a counterpane, and a bolster that Sarah wraps her arms around to lift.

   Jane shivers again—it looks like a body wound in a sheet. She says, "All about her?"

   Sarah tosses her head and gives a smile. "A bit of kindness can go a long way towards getting someone to talk. She'll need a bit of kindness, even from the likes of me—all on her own and her husband drowned."

   Jane grabs the other end of the bolster and pulls so it lies across the top of the bed. With both hands she smoothes it. "I don't see when you're going to talk to her."

   "Why, the new Mrs. Bentley will need someone to do for her— and there's nothing like those moments when you're brushing their hair for them, or doing up their dress, that ladies don't mind talking."

   The pillows are piled on a chair, the pillowcases draped beside them. Jane opens one and pushes the end of a pillow into it, then shakes it down. She looks as though she's concentrating on the pillow, slapping it with the flat of her hand, but when she looks back at Sarah she says, "I don't know about that. I can't imagine what you'd have found out about Mrs. Robert."

   "You'd be surprised." Still, she tilts her head away from Jane, adds, "You're going to have your work cut out for you."

   "How's that?" She lays the pillow against the bolster.

   "If I'm busy with the widow, you'll have to shift yourself to get the rooms done."

   She hadn't thought of this. "But they can't—" she starts. "I can't do all—"

   Sarah walks towards the door, swinging her hips. "Yes, they can— just watch them."

   The door closes behind her, and the room is still.

   On her own Jane works fast, though now there is a nervousness to her movements. How will she be able to get it all done? How can she work any harder than she does already? As it is she must rush through her days to have any hope of getting to bed before ten o'clock at night. Any small thing that gets in her way—Mrs. Robert calling her upstairs, Sarah taking off and having to cover for her— can send her day out of kilter and mean that at eleven o'clock, or even midnight, she is still sweeping or polishing or fetching coal.

   Maybe Sarah is wrong, she tells herself. What is Price, if not a lady's maid? Wouldn't she be the one to do for the widow?

   She works the broom over the bare floorboards around the carpet. Sweep, sweep, sweep, then again, sweep, sweep, sweep, gathering fluff and hair and the gritty dust that covers everything in London. With her hands moving, her thoughts can drift away. Today she thinks of Mrs. Henry Bentley sitting on the deck of a ship next to her husband's coffin, a tragic figure in black, a delicate handkerchief pressed to her eyes. Of course, the coffin is probably down in the hold where the widow cannot sit next to it, but this image satisfies Jane. She doesn't notice that Sarah has carried off the carpet brush until she crosses to the door where her box and bucket wait and she reaches out her hand for it. Gone. Sarah must be in Mr. Robert's room next door and so, with a sigh, Jane steps into the corridor. She knocks and opens the door almost at the same moment, for Mr. and Mrs. Robert are out of the house this morning.

   Sarah is sitting on the bed, and that alone should be enough to make Jane hesitate in the doorway. But what she notices is this: over the sheets of the unmade bed lie papers. Letters by the look of them, and bills, and even some photographs. On the dressing table a portable desk gapes open.

   "Just as I thought," Sarah says, looking up. "Forgot to lock it today, didn't she? Too much on her mind." Then she waves one hand. "Close the door or we'll catch it for sure—Price has been creeping around all morning. You know what she's like."

   Jane pushes the door closed. "Put it away," she urges. "You'll get found out and that'll be it for your character."

   "Well, you're not going to tell on me, are you? Us lot have to stick together. And she's not going to notice a thing." She goes back to the papers, leafing through them, then holding one up to read.

   "I only came for the carpet brush," Jane says. It's leaning against the wall by the bed and evidently hasn't been used yet.

   "Then do me a favor and give the carpets in here a going-over." She doesn't even look up.

   Jane doesn't move.

   Sarah glances at her. "Go on—what are you waiting for? I've done favors for you, haven't I?"

   Jane steps forward, her hand reaches for the brush, and she bends her head away from Sarah as she sweeps. It's not right—she knows that—doing Sarah's work while Sarah sits on the bed reading through Mrs. Robert's things. How to refuse, though, when there's the matter of the tazza? Those two pounds she has paid, the entirety of her wages that Sarah held out her hand for just three days ago, the rest that she still owes? She was a fool, she tells herself.

   Sarah's made herself at home on the bed. Jane wonders: Does she do this often? Does she check drawers and cupboards and desks when she's alone in a room? She thinks of her own box upstairs, and the times she has left it unlocked. As though there is anything in it to find—her spare aprons and caps, two dresses, her stockings and underthings. The half-sovereign she lied to Sarah about. The photograph of her mother. What could a photograph of a young woman in her best things mean to Sarah? Nothing much, surely.

   She works her way across the room towards Sarah, who raises her feet so Jane can sweep beneath them. The long hairs of the carpet brush make only the slightest whisper against the rug, and Jane finds herself listening—for footsteps, for voices in the corridor. Sarah sighs. "Everyone has a secret," she says. "It's just a matter of winkling it out." She picks up another letter.

   Jane keeps her head down, her eyes on the dust and hair that the brush is gathering.

   Before long Sarah pushes the papers together. "Who locks a desk when all they've got in it is a few old dress bills, letters from her hus band that don't say much of anything, and photographs of the two of them together?" She dumps it all back into the desk.

   "Aren't you going to put it back how you found it?"

   "What's she going to do—dismiss me for finding out she doesn't pay her dressmaker on time?" But she bends over the desk and rearranges the papers. "I've waited so long for the chance and now— there's nothing to find out!" She lets out a laugh. "More fool me." She's still laughing as she carries the desk over to the dressing table and sets it down. When she turns around her smile drops away, for there's Mr. Cartwright standing in the doorway, watching.

   "Laughter at a time like this?" he says.

   "Have to keep your spirits up, don't you?" She smiles at him. "I mean—"

   "I do not want to hear what you mean. None of us has time for idle conversation, today of all days. The two of you should be ashamed of yourselves." He shifts his gaze to Jane. "Since you are in here, can I presume that you have finished in Mr. Henry's room?"

   She shakes her head.

   "Then if I were you I would get back to my own duties." He steps close to her. "Don't think that, even at a time like this, I would not intrude a report of misbehavior on Mrs. Robert's attention." His eyes, small and hard, hold hers before she bows her head.

   "Yes, Mr. Cartwright."

   He leans so close that she feels his breath on her cheek. "I'd have thought that with such parentage as yours, you would want to make every effort to prove yourself worthy of the trust Mrs. Robert has placed in you."

   Does she give a cry, or does she only imagine it? Either way, her hand goes to her mouth and she looks up into his face, into the selfsatisfied roundness of his jowls, the mean slant to his lips.

   He spits, "Get along with you."

   She hurries past him, her fist pressed against her mouth. Even with the door of Mr. Henry's room closed behind her she cannot calm herself. She uses her sleeve to wipe the tears from her face, then kneels at the hearth to lift out the arrangement of dried flowers that must have been there for months, so dusty has it become. She dumps it in the bucket and sets to cleaning the hearth. She keeps her mouth closed to hold in her sobs as she dusts, as she fetches kindling and coal from beside the door. This is a precipice, and she is on the edge of it. She imagines being turned out of the house— what would there be for her then? No respectable mistress would hire her, not if she knew the truth.

   What's more, she deserves it. She has betrayed Mrs. Robert. She has helped Sarah pry into Mrs. Robert's things when she promised— didn't she?—to be her eyes and ears below stairs. And what has she told Mrs. Robert? Nothing more than what Mrs. Robert surely has noticed herself: that Mr. Cartwright has a liking for port, that Sarah is often out on errands, that all of them below stairs eat far too well. What will Mrs. Robert think of her when she hears that Jane has hidden the fact that her mother stabbed a gentleman and killed him?

   Slowly her crying wears itself out, as it must. Her face still feels hot, her eyes gritty from the salt of her tears. But she thinks: Cartwright talked of Mrs. Robert's trust. What can that mean except that he thinks she
already
knows? If that's what he believes, he won't tell her himself. So she's safe. For now.